In Wales online on Oct 17C 2014:

We cannot trust the Department for Health’: Carwyn Jones attacks Whitehall in astonishing blast

Wales First Minister has accused the Department for Health in London of being too politicised and said that Wales could not work with it.

Mr Jones made the blunt comments during an exclusive interview with the Western Mail in which he defended his administration’s running of the NHS against attacks from opposition parties and professional groups like the British Medical Association.

In the first part of the interview, Mr Jones spoke about his hope of rebuilding trust in politicians and countering the threat of UKIP

The First Minister referred to a story we ran last week in which Monmouth Conservative MP David Davies criticised the Welsh Government for allegedly “blocking” a comparative study of the NHS in the four UK nations to be carried out by the respected international organisation, the OECD.

The Welsh Government said it wasn’t prepared to participate in the study, and put off a visit to Wales by OECD officials, when the Department of Health said it planned to use statistics in the draft report in next year’s general election campaign.

The Welsh Government said such statistics in the section on Wales would be “unverified” before it confirmed their accuracy.

Such concerns follow attacks by the Conservatives on the NHS in Wales over longer waiting times and cross-border issues which see some patients in Wales deprived of drugs they could be prescribed in England.

Conservative Party chairman Grant Shapps has made it clear that his party will be drawing attention to the Welsh NHS’s perceived inadequacies during the run-up to May’s general election.

Referring to the OECD story, Mr Jones said: “Scotland and Northern Ireland are as annoyed as we are. There was an agreement that this would be a four-nation assessment.

“The Department of Health refused to give an assurance that they wouldn’t use unverified figures in the general election.

“So ourselves, Scotland and Northern Ireland said ‘let’s follow the usual process here and embargo the figures until after the general election’. They wouldn’t do it – that’s how politicised the Department of Health has become.

“We’ve said that if they don’t sort this out, we’ll go ahead ourselves and have an OECD assessment [commissioned by us] rather than wait for them and the political games they’re playing. Hey presto – the story was fed to a Conservative MP.

“The Department of Health, I’m afraid, we do not trust at all. It’s the most politicised department of any department of Whitehall. They have form on this – they did it on veterans’ health. We can’t work with them, frankly. We could not share anything confidential with them. They would leak it.”

The Department of Health did not wish to respond to the First Minister’s comments.

Last month Mr Jones dismissed calls from the BMA for an independent inquiry into the state of the NHS in Wales.

Speaking to AMs, he said people he knew in the medical profession did not share the BMA’s belief that the health service in Wales was facing “imminent meltdown”.

Asked who were the people he’d sought a reaction from over the comment, Mr Jones said: “What I said was that I knew a lot of medical students when I came to work in Cardiff {as a barrister}, and as a result of that I now know a lot of consultants and GPs, and I did take the views of a number of them.

“I think use of the phrase ‘imminent meltdown’ was unfortunate. It hasn’t happened and I don’t think it will happen. I very much welcome the fact that in the discussions which have taken since and the public pronouncements they have made the BMA has emphasised their willingness to work with the Welsh Government. These things happen from time to time, but we want to work with them.”

Mr Jones said he didn’t accept the need for the sort of inquiry the BMA had called for.

He said: “They’re asking for an inquiry into their own members, if they think about it. When particular issues have surfaced, like [concerns over the treatment of patients at] the Princess of Wales Hospital [in Bridgend], for example, we have conducted investigations into that. But there are no grounds to have a full inquiry into the NHS or the practice of doctors in the NHS in Wales.

“There were management problems at the Princess of Wales – there’s no question about that. There’s a new team in there now. What was important was that there was an investigation into what had happened. People were able to and they did take part in that investigation, and that has identified the problems. It was said that spot checks have to take place around Wales, and that’s been done.”

Mr Jones said: “We have a health service, and it’s true across the UK, where demand ever increases. Keeping up with that demand is always a challenge and we’ve met that challenge this year by finding more money for the health service – that much is true. But if you look at the increase in demand over the last decade – A&E attendances have gone up by 70%.

“With the Ambulance Trust, for example, it’s true to say that they’ve fallen short of their target, but in comparison to this time last year, they’re carrying more people.

“The rising demand in the NHS is a challenge for us, but also for Scotland, for England and Northern Ireland as well. For us in Wales we have to make sure that we fund the NHS to a level where people in Wales would want, but it does of course mean there are difficult decisions to be made elsewhere.”

Asked whether he was worried by cases where people living in Wales complained about not being able to get access to certain drugs or medical procedures that would be available to them if they lived across the border in England, Mr Jones said there were drugs like Abraxane, for example, that were available in Wales but not in England.

He said: “It’s quite common for us, of course, to pay for people from Wales to pay for particular medical procedures in England, because that’s where the centres of specialisation are. No-one is suggesting that the Welsh NHS should be entirely self-contained and that nobody should get treatment elsewhere.

“If you look at cancer, for example, we do far better in terms of cancer treatment than England. We get drugs more quickly than in England. There are cancer drugs available in Wales that are not available in England – and the same is true the other way round.”

Mr Jones said the method of assessing whether particular drugs should be available was being reviewed.

He said: “We want to make sure it’s fair across the whole of Wales,” he said.

The First Minister denied he had become a “constitutional obsessive”, preoccupied with what powers the Assembly should have rather than the bread and butter issues that concern real people.

He has been criticised for this by Welsh Tory leader Andrew RT Davies, who used a speech to tell him: ‘Stop talking about more powers and sort the Welsh NHS out’

Mr Jones said: “No. I’ve become obsessive, I suppose, about a UK that stays together. If you look at what happened in Scotland, there’s no way you can argue that things are going to go back to what they were before. From my point of view I want the UK to have a new structure – one that keeps the UK together, one that accommodates the different nationalities in the UK, but one that gets the balance right between solidarity and autonomy.”